Rhea joined May 30, 2008

I'm a huge nerd and the community manager for ISOTX. I like rainy days, Team Fortress 2, and chocolate chip cookies. Feel free to message me here if you have any questions about the Iron Grip: Warlord series.
I am NOT a technical support person, by the by. I get a lot of emails and PMs on this site about MEC or MEC2. It's best to post on the MidEast Crisis community and they can help you directly; I can only advise with games I helped directly on, like the Iron Grip series.

We got the professional license, but our team's put a lot of effort into editing it and adding features to it. They actually just finished taping a dev blog for next week which we'll post up here, that'll probably start to answer some of your questions about the graphics and more.

We have actually been looking for a programmer for IG:TO for over a year now. We have a very tiny budget for any fan who has the skills to pick it up. We can't devote our lead team to it anymore, as they got sucked into IG: Warlord and IG: Marauders, but IG:TO is our roots and we love it. It would be amazing to see someone pick it up. If you find anyone (or if anyone is reading this) PM me! We'd be thrilled!

@Shoelip
We don't plan to do extrene gameplay advantages via money. We plan on micro-payments to be for purely cosmetic things; like you could pay $1 and get an avatar with a goofy pair of glasses (totally off the wall example, do not quote me on this). We hope these sort of payments, which are optional rather than forcing everyone to pay, will help us get enough money to keep adding new maps and expand the game. Something we found with IG: Warlord was a lot of people played the demo, and kept playing it, but weren't willing to pay for it. We wanted to appeal to all our fans, broke or not; cheap or not.

I mean, nobody wants to play a game that's really biased towards money, why would you play for free if John Doe could plop down $10 and win every time over you? ;) That's definitely not what we're aiming for.

As for it being in a browser, that's why we're using the Unity engine. It feels a lot like it's not in a browser, you can take my word for it for now but we'll have a beta soon where people can play it!

We did not have a set time on Monday so all I could say was Monday, which is true. We have a set time now from the team lead and everyone, saying it's good to go in the evening PST - a counter wouldn't have worked in this case.

I really hope a few more hours isn't a big let down for people, it's not the world's worst news - we are releasing after all ;)

I see tons of comments here - the fans are awesome, but we meant American time and it may be later in the evening for every site to update :) So if you're in GMT, it will be Tuesday for y'all, and if you're Aussie, it'll be even later, and we're sorry 'bout that. But don't fret, no huge delays in sight, it's just not a midnight launch.

Also, some perspective, right now it's 2AM here where the MEC2 staff is posting from on Monday... so we have a good 22 hours to keep you in suspense!

The actual server where our domain is completely failed :( We have backups and it's online now - nothing to do with the game itself (that's fine, servers are up, etc.), so much as our internal websites - but we're waiting to make sure everything's fine before we do any huge posts.